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Reviews: Slugfest – inside fifty years of Marvel-DC rivalry

Growing up as a comics reader there was often a dividing line for many – are you DC or Marvel? Personally, even as a kid I found that a silly distinction as I read comics from both – and of course in Britain, back then, we had a huge amount of homegrown comics competing for our reading time as well (and they were easier to get hold of than US imports). But for many readers it was a real question, and that rivalry for the attentions of comics readers between The Big Two is the meat and drink (and sometimes spilled drink) of Reed Tucker’s fascinating history in Slugfest.

The comics business has changed enormously since the birth of the superheroes in the 1930s; they’ve survived (well, some have, not all) wars, depressions, civil unrest, the rise of several new media, changing societies, circulation declines and changes in consumption. And in the US the main contenders have, since the 60s, been Marvel and DC. DC, still, even by the 50s and early 60s, a staid, conservative, buttoned-down place, run by old men with pipes and leather patches on their jacket elbows, growing every further out of touch with their young readership. And with the arrival of Stan Lee’s hyperbole and energy they have a competitor they need to fight against for readership. Except the old men in charge refuse to see this new upstart as a serious rival – much to their cost.

It’s the beginning of decades of rivalry and competition – and often sniping at one another, sometimes humorously, sometimes quite nastily. And as the tired old crossover “events” pretty much always say “nothing will ever be the same again!!!”. Tucker takes us through the once-exciting characters now stultifyingly stale at DC and their initial reluctance to change – or even acknowledge change is needed – as the Marvel experiment begins to draw more and more readers and exciting new talents. It’s a heady, exciting time – Kirby, Ditko and more give readers something exciting and new, starting a whole new wave in the medium, with work that has inspired – arguably is still inspiring – new creators who, in their turn, would also explore just what else they could do with comics storytelling. And eventually that would stir changes in DC, elderly staffers finally out, new blood in, and an ongoing exchange between both publishers as one would, inevitably, follow the other on new ideas and innovations (or downright gimmicks).

“Comic books were disreputable, and that was fine by me,” Denny O’Neill commenting on being part of the new blood brought in by DC in the 60s in reaction to Marvel.

Some of this will be common knowledge to a lot of comics fans, I imagine – I certainly knew many of the broad brushstrokes of the DC-Marvel rivalry, but what Tucker does here is to fill in far more detail into that picture. He discusses not just the main competition between the publishers over who had the most popular characters and titles, the best circulations, Tucker goes into more depth. Problems such as distribution, interference from the owners, self-censorship with the Comic Code, the decline in sales, the slow death of the newsstands and the establishment of the direct market and the specialist comic shops, the change in readership from mostly youngsters to adults, the rise of the “superstar” writers and artists like Miller, Morrison and others, the slow evolution of the capes and tights to the big screen (from the Superman movie of the 70s showing they could be huge box office for adults and kids through the duds to the current box office domination), the increasingly corporate nature of the Big Two and more.

Crucially Tucker has spoken to a huge number of people who have worked in the industry, and those first hand accounts and personal insights are where the book really sparkles. Writers, artists, editors, Tucker talks to a large array of talent from across those decades, giving a much more personal and relatable inside view, some working exclusively for one publisher or the other, but many going from one side to the opposition, sometimes because they lost their job, or were fed up with their treatment and walked (keeping your talent happy seems to be a lesson both side often ignored, foolishly), more than a few actively poached from one publisher to the other. The larger events here are important and worthwhile reading for anyone with a love of the comics medium, but it is these many personal touches from the numerous creators Tucker talks to which truly makes Slugfest so compelling.